dichotic noise

I updated the code of the previous experiment (Sharing Ubiquity Commands) such that when you open an URL that contains a shared Ubiquity action, it won’t open Ubiquity in preview mode, but display a small icon.

This also allows to display multiple commands on one page, and by using Ubiquity annotation database I could create this command history; such that when you revisit a page where you had already applied some ubiquity commands you will see the icons for each, awaiting re-​applying.

(If the video is clipped, try it here)

Note: The icon and the icon insertion code is repurposed from Aza’s Mouse Based Ubiquity experiments.

My experimental (read ugly) code is available at http://​gist​.github​.com/​2​0​1​053

I recently spoke with Aza Raskin at FOWA on Ubiquity commands/​annotations sharing. I promised I’ll prototype something, here it is…

(If the video is clipped, try it here)

When someone applies an Ubiquity command to a piece of content that tells us what’s the type of that content. The user is making an annotation which is not made for the annotation sake, but made for solving a real need. That annotation if shared could be useful in various ways.

But first let’s look at all the data involved, consider that Alice is selecting some text on a web page, invokes Ubiquity and types ‘translate to japanese’. We have the folowing elements:

1. user: anonymous or with an identity (URI)
2. web page address (URI)
3. selected content
4. Ubiquity command (URI) with arguments

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I’ll assume that who reads this knows what Ubiquity is, if not check it out, it’s awesome.

Since Ubiquity can remember edits you do to a page (via edit and save commands), it may also be able to remember what other commands you applied to a piece of content, such that when you revisit that page you’ll see a small visual hint (could be similar to Alex Faaborg microformats experiments, or Aza Raskin’s mouse Ubiquity experiments) that would let you re-​apply the command.

Imagine that you visit a blog post about a party, and the map command is just one click away just because you did it before.

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Aza Raskin on conversational computing and “The Semantic Web” (loving the quotes)

OK, how can we have Ubiquity publish what people map (with their permission, of course), what commands they use on what piece of content?

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